Social Understanding Through Spiritual Scientific Knowledge

A Lecture By
Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, October 4, 1919
GA 191

This lecture was given in Dornach, Switzerland on October 4, 1919. In the
Collected Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works it appears as the second lecture
in GA 191 which has the German title Social Verständnis aus
geisteswissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis.

Thanks to an anonymous donation, this lecture has been made available.

I

n
the middle one of these three lectures there are a number of
anthroposophical truths in particular that I would like to develop for you.
We shall then see what a great impact on a person's everyday life these
particular truths have, and that is what we will talk about tomorrow.
Today I just want to draw your attention to some deeper aspect of the
being of man.

People very often do not ask the question as to which of man's forces are
used to acquire knowledge of super-sensible worlds. They try to answer
this question merely by saying that there is a possibility of acquiring
super-sensible knowledge by means of certain forces in man. But what the
actual connections are between these forces and man's being, they do not
usually ask. That is why so little importance is attached to making
knowledge of super-sensible worlds really fruitful in ordinary life. It can
be said that super-sensible knowledge is becoming more and more
essential to man, just in our time. In that case it is vital to understand
what its connection is with ordinary everyday life.

As you know, the first of the capacities that leads man into super-sensible
realms is the force of Imagination, the second capacity is the force of
Inspiration and the third capacity the force of Intuition. The question now
is whether these capacities need concern us at all except in their
connection with knowledge of super-sensible worlds or whether these
capacities have any part to play in the rest of man's life? You will see that
the latter is the case. As my little book
Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy
tells you, we can see human life running its course in
three stages: from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to
puberty, and from puberty till about the twenty-first year. If you do not
regard man purely superficially, you will be struck by the fact that the
nature of man's development is entirely different in the three different
seven-year stages. The pushing through of our permanent teeth, as I have
often mentioned, is connected with the development of forces that are not
merely confined, let us say, to our jaws or their neighboring organs, but
fill our whole physical body. There is work in progress within our
physical body between birth and the seventh year, and this work comes to
an end with the pushing through of our permanent teeth.

It is obvious that the forces doing this work of developing the physical
body are super-sensible, isn't it? The perceptible body is only the material
in which they work. These super-sensible forces, active in the whole of
man's organization during the first seven years of his life, become, as it
were, suspended when their purpose has been achieved and the
permanent teeth have appeared. At the age of seven these forces go to
sleep. They are hidden within the being of man; they go to sleep within
him. And they can be drawn forth from your being when you do the sort
of exercises I describe in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as leading to
Intuition. For the forces that are applied in the acquisition of intuitive
knowledge are the same forces that you grow with at the time of life
when this growth culminates in the change of teeth. These sleeping
forces that are active within the human body until the seventh year are the
forces you use in super-sensible knowledge to reach Intuition.

Now the forces that are active from the seventh year to the fourteenth
year and go to sleep at puberty in the depths of the body, are drawn forth
and form the power of Inspiration. And the forces that in bygone times
used to be the source of youthful ideals between the fourteenth and the
twenty-first year  it would be too much of an assertion to say that this
still happens today  the forces that create organs in the physical body
for these ideals of youth, are the same forces you can draw forth from
their state of slumber and use for the acquisition of Imagination.

From this you will see that the forces of Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition are not just any old forces gotten from we do not know where,
but are the same forces as those we grow with from our birth to the age of
twenty-one. So the forces that live in Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition are very healthy forces. They are the forces a human being uses
for his healthy growth and that go to sleep within his body when the
corresponding phases of growth are completed.

I have just shown you the connections between the forces of
super-sensible knowledge and man's everyday existence. Something
similar, though, can be said about the forces of man's normal nature,
man's nature as it appears in ordinary life. Only there it is not so obvious.
A very important force in ordinary life  and we have discussed it many
times  is the force of memory. The power of memory is active within
us when, as we say, we remember something we have experienced. But,
as you all know, there is something peculiar about the power of memory.
We have got it and yet we haven't got it. Many a person struggles at some
moment of his life to try and remember something that he cannot
remember. This wanting to remember but not being able to remember
entirely, arises through the fact that the force in our souls with which we
remember is the same force that transforms the food we eat into the sort
of substances of which our body can make use. If you eat a piece of bread
and this bread is transformed inside your body into the sort of substance
that serves life, this is apparently a physical process. This physical
process, however, is governed by super-sensible forces. These
super-sensible forces are the same forces you use when you remember. So
the same kinds of forces are being used on the one hand for memory and
on the other hand for the assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body.
And you actually always have to oscillate a bit between your soul and
your body if you want to dwell in memory. If your body is carrying out
the process of digesting too well, you may find you will not be able to
draw enough forces away from it to remember certain things. There is an
inner struggle going on the whole time in the unconscious between a soul
process and a bodily process every time you want to remember
something. Looking at memory is the best way to understand how absurd
it is basically, from a higher point of view, for some people to be idealists
and other people materialists. The assimilation of foodstuffs in the human
body is doubtless a material process. The forces controlling it are the
same as the forces at work in a process of ideas, namely the force of
memory. You only see the world aright if you see it as being neither
materialistic nor idealistic, but are capable of following up the ideal
aspect of what is presented in a material way and following up the material
aspect of what is presented as idea. The spiritual quality of a world
conception is not being able to say Over there is base materialism,
which is for the dregs of humanity, and over here is idealism,
which is for the elect  and the speaker usually includes himself
among these  but the essential quality of a really spiritual world
conception lies in its capacity to take what it has grasped in the spirit and
bring it down into material existence so that material existence can be
understood and not despised. That is the fallacy of many religious
denominations, that they despise material existence instead of understanding
it and looking for the spirit within it.

The crux of the matter is really to go into these things, and not, as is still
largely the case, to deal in empty phrases where mysticism is concerned.
After having as it were shown you how these things can really be gone
into, I would now like to bring something of very great importance.
When people speak of material existence and super-sensible existence,
they usually speak of them as though material existence were spread out
in the world and as though super-sensible, non-perceptible existence were
somewhere behind or above this. If you imagine you simply have
physical-perceptible existence on the one hand and super-sensible
existence on the other, you will never understand man. There is no way
of really grasping man if you look at things from the point of view of the
perceptible world versus the super-sensible world. In reality it is like this:
The world of the senses and the world in which we work and live socially
are spread out around us. Let us represent diagrammatically by means of
this line this world that is spread out around us (see horizontal line of
drawing). You will only have a complete picture of what is actually there
in the world if you imagine that there are forces above this line,
super-sensible forces (red side). We neither perceive these super-sensible
forces by means of our ordinary senses nor by means of our intellect
bound to our ordinary senses. We perceive only what is in the realm of
this line.

But there are forces under this line as well. If we actually want to
include the whole of the imperceptible or spiritual realm, we must speak of
subsensible as well as super-sensible forces. So we must imagine that
there are also subsensible forces here (orange side).

Thus we have the sense world, super-sensible forces and subsensible
forces. Where does man himself, as an ordinary person, belong? The part
of him you see standing in front of you belongs entirely to this line. But
super-sensible forces from one side and subsensible forces from the other
side work into the part of man that belongs to the line. Man is the result
of super-sensible and subsensible forces. Now which of man's forces are
super-sensible and which are subsensible? All the forces connected with
understanding are super-sensible, that is, everything we make use of for
understanding. And these are the same forces that also form our head. So
we can say that the super-sensible forces are the forces of understanding.

Now subsensible forces also work into man. What kind of forces are
these? These are will forces. All the will forces, everything in man that is
of the nature of will, is subsensible.

An obvious question is where do these subsensible forces, these will
forces, come from? They are the same forces as the forces of the planets,
that is, from our point of view, the forces of the earth. Yes indeed, the
forces of the earth are perpetually working into man. And it is our forces
of will that are connected with these forces of the planets, these forces of
the earth. The forces of understanding come to us from the world's
periphery, and pour into us as it were from outside, from the outside of
the planet. The forces of will enter into us from the planet itself. This is
how the forces of our own planet earth live within us. The moment we
enter birth the forces of planet earth are active within us.

The question now arises as to how this activity is distributed. There is a
considerable difference in this respect in the first, second and third stage
of life, that is, up till the seventh year, the fourteenth year and the
twenty-first year. The will working in us up till the seventh year works
entirely from out of the planet's interior. It is very interesting to see
spiritual-scientifically that in everything working in the child up till the
age of seven, it is the force of the earth's depths that are active. If you
want to see an actual manifestation of the forces of the earth's interior,
then make a study of everything going on in the child up till the age of
seven, for these are the forces from within the earth. To delve down into the
earth to find the forces of the earth's interior would be absolutely wrong.
You would only find earth substances. The forces that are active in the earth
come to manifestation in the work they do in the human being up till his
seventh year. And from the seventh to the fourteenth year, it is the forces
of the encircling air that work in man, forces that still belong to the earth,
to the earth's atmosphere. These are predominantly at work in everything
developing in the human being between seven and fourteen. Then comes
the most important stage of all, from fourteen to twenty-one. At this stage
the subsensible passes over into the super-sensible. Here a kind of balance
is created between the subsensible and super-sensible. Now the forces of
the earth's whole solar system work at organizing the human being.

So we have the earth's interior in the first period of life; encircling air in
the second period of life, that is, what the earth itself is embedded in. The
forces streaming down from cosmic spaces in so far as these cosmic
spaces are filled with our own actual planetary system, up till the twenty-
first year. Not until the age of twenty-one does man tear himself away, as
it were, from the influences brought about in him from outside by the
planets and the planetary system belonging to these.

Please notice that in everything I have referred to as having an influence
on man, bodily influences are of course included. They are bodily
processes that the forces from the planet's interior bring about up till the
seventh year. They are bodily processes that are formed by the circulating
air in connection with the breathing and so on between the seventh and
the fourteenth year. There is no doubt that they are bodily processes, in
fact actual transformations of bodily organs are brought about;
everything being connected with man's growing and becoming larger.
Thus man grows beyond all this work being done on him by the earth; all
this ceases at twenty-one.

What happens then, however? What happens after twenty-one? Up till
twenty-one we draw on what comes from the earth and its planetary
system in the way we have described. We build up our constitution with
the earth's help. Then, after we have reached the age of twenty-one, we
have to draw on ourselves. We gradually have to release what we have
put into our organism from out of the forces of the planet and the
planetary system.

Activities going on in the blood forces always used to ensure that this
happened in the past. As you will probably know, man has not learned to
release the planetary forces himself, after the age of twenty-one. And yet
he has been doing so. He did it as an unconscious process. The capacity
was in his blood. It was built into him to do it. The important change in
our present time  and the present extends over a long period of several
centuries, of course  is that man's blood is losing the capacity to
release what we have put into the organism in this way, before twenty-
one.

The important changes taking place in humanity at the present time are
based on the waning of the forces in the blood. These things cannot be
testified by external anatomy and physiology; to do that they would need
to investigate bodies from the tenth or ninth centuries in order to discover
that blood was different then. And they would not even have had the
chemical tests to do it. But through spiritual science we can know with
certainty that man's blood has grown weaker. And the great turning-point
when human blood began to grow weak lay in the middle of the fifteenth
century.

What are the consequences? The consequences of this are that what we
cannot carry out unconsciously any more by means of our blood, we have
to carry out consciously. We have to educate ourselves to do consciously
what was simply done unconsciously by man's blood in the past. For the
strength in our blood is in the process of fading away. What would
happen if a time were to come when human beings completely lost hold
of their youth, and were unable to draw on their youthful forces, if there
were no means of resorting to doing consciously what was once done
unconsciously by the blood?

You must not take these things in a purely theoretical way, of course. As
theories, they may be interesting, but to take them as theories is not
enough. Nowadays they have to be put into practice, for they are
connected with the practical matter of the evolution of mankind. They
must be put into practice to the point of making us conscious that man's
whole educational system has to change. We have to help man to develop
a strong, conscious capacity to re-experience later in life, as though with
the force of elemental memory, what he has received in his youth.

Everywhere, people are still working contrary to this requirement. For
instance, they are proud of the visual aids used in primary school
education, and they attach great importance to getting down to the mental
level of the child as far as possible, and not teaching him anything that
extends beyond his mental capacity. They actually rig up calculating
machines so that they can teach the children to do all kinds of sums by
counting balls. Nothing must go beyond the child's mental capacity.
These visual aid lessons get frightfully trivial and trite. It is bound to
lead to nothing but commonplace concepts if they avoid giving the child
anything beyond its own mental capacity. People who do this thoroughly
overlook an important yet subtle observation of human life.

Suppose a child is taught in such a way that he takes a particular thing in,
not because it is absolutely on his own mental level, but because his
teacher's warmth of enthusiasm gets passed on to him, and the child takes
the thing in because the teacher in his enthusiasm tells him about it. The
child takes it in just because it lives in the warmth emanating from the
teacher. If the child absorbs something that reaches beyond his
understanding, purely because of the infectious quality of his teacher's
enthusiasm, he will not yet understand what he has taken in, as people
say in superficial life. Yet what he has taken in lives in his soul. At the
age of thirty the grownup will remember what the child took in, perhaps,
at the age of ten. He re-experiences it. He has become mature now, and he
can understand what he is able to release from the depths of his soul; he
can understand the thing he was taught purely through the force of
enthusiasm, and which he is now able to release from his mature mind.
You know, these are the most valuable moments in life, when your
mental life does not have to be restricted to what comes to meet you from
outside, but you re-experience what you took in your younger days with
inadequate understanding, and which you can now release and absorb
with your more mature mind. The more care you take that the child does
not just get the sort of lessons where it matter-of-factly takes in what it
understands  for that will disappear with the passing years, and neither
joy nor enthusiasm will come from it later  the more you will be doing
for the person's later development; for lessons taken in purely through
the teacher's warmth are life-giving when they are re-experienced.

Nowadays this is of particular importance in teaching. In earlier times it
was not so important, for in those days the releasing was carried out by
the blood, whereas now it has to be brought to consciousness. It certainly
makes a difference if you understand the kinds of things that are being
put to practical use by spiritual science. Because if you understand them
in the right way, you will find an opportunity somewhere in life of
making practical use of them for the good of humanity. In this case, if
you understand it properly, you will find an opportunity to make use of
the fact that our blood is becoming weak, by attaching all the more
importance to the teacher's capacity for enthusiasm.

But people are so little aware nowadays of what is at stake. For
standardized education still plays a great part, that is, the kind of
education that works with a whole set of standard rules. Education is
learned, how to teach a child is learned, how to arrange the lesson is
learned. Comparing this with our present-day consciousness it would be
like learning that man consists of carbohydrates, protein and so on 
these are our constituents and they undergo such and such changes inside
our body, and we cannot eat before we have understood this; for we do
not eat in a physiological sense until we understand it. I told you once,
and you may even have experienced this yourselves, that you can already
come across a thing like this: You visit someone who has a scale standing
beside his plate, and he carefully puts a piece of meat on the scale to find
out how much it weighs, for he may only eat a piece of meat of a quite
specific weight. Physiology already determines his appetite. But not
everybody does it this way yet, thank goodness! It is important to
understand that physiology is not part of the eating process but covers
other aspects, and that a person can eat without having studied
physiology, the physiology of the nutritional process. But we do not take
it for granted that we also ought to teach, that is, teach in a living way,
without having absorbed standardized education. This standardized
education is exactly the same thing to a good teacher as the aesthetics of
color is to an artist. He can have studied aesthetics of color very well, but
he will not be able to paint because of that. The ability to paint comes
from an entirely different quarter than the study of the aesthetics of color.
The ability to teach comes from an entirely different quarter than the
study of education. The important thing, today, is not to give would-be
teachers a seminar of some sort of standardized education that prescribes
dogmas, but to give them the sort of thing that makes them become
teachers and educators in the same way as people become artists or
botanists. It is that the educator has to be born in a person and not that
education has to be learned.

What has to be understood just because of this very change in man's
setup is that education has to be a real art. In the time of transition people
were at sixes and sevens as to what to do about education. That is why
they invented so many abstract educational systems. The essential thing
today, however, is to give people a real knowledge of man, especially if
they are teachers, You see, if you possess this real knowledge of man and
work out of it with children, a remarkable thing will happen: Let us
suppose you are a teacher and have your pupils in front of you. If you are
a student of standardized education, the kind that follows the rules, then
you will know exactly how you have to teach, because you will have
learned the rules. You will teach according to these rules, today, just as
you taught according to these rules yesterday and will teach according to
them tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But if you are the artist kind
of teacher you are not nearly so well off. For now you cannot teach
yesterday, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow according to the
same rules, but have to learn from the child afresh each time, how he has
to be taught; it must be man's own nature every time that determines
what you do. And it is ideal if the teacher can teach the way the child tells
him to teach, and can keep on forgetting actual education and has not got
a clue about the rules. For the moment the child stands in front of him
again he will again be electrified by the growing child and will know
what he has to do with him.

You must pay attention to the way things have to be said, to the way
things have to be spoken about today. You cannot speak about these
things today in such a way that they can be put into so and so many
satisfying principles, but you can only speak about them by pointing to
something alive, something that cannot be reduced to abstract principles
but which is alive and produces ever more life. That is the crux of the
matter. That is why spiritual science is needed in actual life today,
because spiritual science is not merely for the head but is for the whole of
man and releases will impulses. Indeed it ought to enter into many realms
of life, so that impulses of will are eventually brought into every sphere
of human activity.

I have demonstrated this in one particular realm of life, namely
education, and shown how the education of children under the age of
twenty-one can be made to bear fruit for later life. People do not receive
an education only up to the age of twenty-one, though, for education
carries on throughout the whole of life. But this only happens in a healthy
way if people learn from one another.

This too was done by the blood in earlier ages of history. When people
met in social life they used to learn things from one another
unconsciously, some people learning more and others less, according to
the way their blood worked. But our blood has grown weak and has lost
its power. This activity, too, has to be replaced by more consciousness.
People must achieve the art of acquiring relatively more for themselves
from other people compared with what they produce from out of
themselves. In earlier times it was sufficient to rely on life. The blood did
everything. Now it is essential for people really to develop a sense for the
other person's being. This will come about as a matter of course if people
steer their thoughts in the direction of spiritual science. Different kinds of
thoughts are stimulated with spiritual science than without it.

You will not doubt this fact, for the way spiritual science is received by
people who do not want to know anything about their thoughts shows
that spiritual scientific thoughts are different from thoughts without
spiritual science. It is necessary to develop a totally new way of thinking.
The kind of thinking we develop when we accustom ourselves to
working with super-sensible thoughts is the kind of thinking that has an
effect on our organism. And when I told you today that memory is the
same force that transforms food into substances man needs for his
organism, you will no longer be astonished to find that other forces can
be transformed in man, like for instance the force with which we
understand super-sensible things being the same one that helps us to know
the human being better than we would know him if we had no healthy
longing for super-sensible knowledge.

You people study what is in my
Occult Science,
and to do that you have
to develop certain concepts that most people would still call utter
madness. A few days ago, I got yet another letter from someone
studying
Occult Science,
and he said that nearly every chapter was pure
nonsense. You can understand people saying it is pure nonsense. Why, it
is quite obvious that they often say it these days. Yet these people who do
not put themselves out to accept the kind of concepts that lead to Saturn,
Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, and do not get down to
developing ideas about a world that is not limited to the senses will also
not acquire any knowledge of man. They do not see the human being in
the other person but notice at the most that one person has a more pointed
nose than the other, and one has blue eyes whereas the other has brown.
But they notice nothing of man's inner being that manifests as his soul
and organizes his body. The same force which enables us to take an
interest, and I am not saying now that it enables us to have super-sensible
occult powers, but the same force that enables us to take an interest in
super-sensible knowledge also gives us the kind of knowledge of man that
we need today.

You can set up the most grandiose social programs and develop the finest
social ideas, but if people shy away from acquiring any knowledge of man
and do not see any real humanity in one another, they will never be able
to bring about social conditions. They cannot produce social conditions
unless they establish the possibility that people can be social.
But people cannot be social if they do not see the human quality in one
another, but live entirely within themselves. Human beings can only
become social if they really meet one another in life, and something
passes between them. This is the root of the social problem. Most people
say of the social question nowadays, that if certain things were arranged
in such and such a way people would be able to lead a social existence.
But it is not like that. If things are arranged like that, social people
will be good people in a social sense, and anti-social people will be
anti-social with any sort of arrangement.

The essential thing is to make the sort of arrangements that allow for
human beings to develop really social impulses. And one of these social
impulses is knowledge. But as long as you go on educating people, for
instance, with an eye to their becoming clerks or army officers or some
other kind of civil servant, you will not educate them to recognize the
human quality in others. For the sort of education that is good for
becoming a clerk or an officer only helps you to see clerks and officers in
other people. The kind of education that makes human beings of people
also enables them to recognize people as human beings. But it is
impossible to recognize people as human beings if you do not develop a
sense for super-sensible knowledge. And the realm in which super-sensible
knowledge is most indispensable is in the art of education. Therefore the
natural scientific, materialistic way of thinking has done more damage in
the field of education than anywhere else. And here you can experience
the most amazing things.

In every department you find well-meaning people today, who want to
reform everything, even revolutionize them. But if you talk to these
people about these things, something very strange transpires. They will
admit quite honestly to a particular conviction about reforming things.
Yet one of them who happens to be a tailor will ask you how his
existence as a tailor is going to be affected when things change. And
another person, who is, let us say, a railway clerk, asks you how his life
as a railway clerk is going to suffer when things are changed. These are
only given as examples to show you that people are perfectly in
agreement that everything should be changed as long as nothing changes
and everything remains exactly the same. The vast majority of people
today are convinced that everything must stay exactly the same when it
changes. Make no mistake about the fact that the sort of social
improvement people long for today is of extremely abstract dimensions.
People long for a great deal, but nothing must change where their
comfort is concerned.

And this is particularly true where it is a matter of people taking an inner
step into an entirely new situation. Nevertheless the essential thing is that
people open themselves to the possibility of making the transition to
thinking in quite a new way about man changing himself in his innermost
being.

All sorts of questions arise from these considerations, questions that are
absolutely pertinent to life. What we must realize is that we have
constructed a deeper foundation for these questions, by saying that
although certain forces appear to be of a spiritual-soul nature, they also
come to expression in our bodily nature. For the capacity is terribly
lacking today, to bring down to a material level what we think of on a
spiritual level. Not until we are capable of bringing down onto a material
level what we think of as being spiritual shall we be able to grasp the
actual nerve of the social question.

Thus it is virtually a matter of aiming towards a way of thinking that
really develops a knowledge of man that is at one and the same time a
social impulse. A way of thinking based on anything else is not adequate.
A mentality based on the life of the state or the life of economics creates
clerks and officers. But the sort of mentality we need creates human
beings. This can only be the sort of thought life that breaks away from the
sphere of economics and the life of the state. That is why our Threefold
Social Organism had to happen. We had to show in a radical way that
any kind of dependency of thought life on economics or on the life of the
state had to stop, and thought life had to be set up on its own basis. Then
thought life will be able to give economics and the life of the state what
economics and the state cannot give to the life of thought.

That is the important thing, that is what is vital! Whole human beings
will only arise again when we work out of an independent life of thought.